Much more inspirational weather in Piriapolis today. Finally it feels like the spring it should be down here. So I thought it would be a good day to start tackling the inner frames of front windows. They are screwed to small plastic cubes that are, or should I say were, glued to the hull around the window. The problem was that the gluing work was done during the winter in Stockholm. Gluing in -25°C is a sure recipe for a badly done job, but there was no choice at the time. Now its 45° warmer and I think it will work a lot better… Also because I am changing to ABS plastic from the previous PE, which is a bit hard to glue.

By the way, I am sitting on 220 meters of floating mooring rope that was just delivered. This is what we will use in the anchorages down in the Beagle channel to keep the boat tied to land when anchored.

End of the summer break! Or should I say winter break? I get confused, because most people I talk to think it has been summer during these months. But down here it has been winter. And still is to some degree. I was greeted by my neighbor with “Prepare for 50 knots of wind tomorrow!” when I arrived on Monday. And she was right. This is what they recorded at the airport:

That’s really close to hurricane gusts actually. Nice. I can tell you we had some fun in the marina….

If you look at the center of this picture, you see a yellow garbage can and the handles of a bike sticking out of the water. The bike was parked on what is usually the 1 meter high pier. Only now it has half a meter of water on top of it. Which was good in this case because if not all the boats would have crashed into the pier edge. Now we went above it instead!!

Photos of people taking photos are always fun! In this case it is significant: What you see is well know meteorologist and climate researcher Martin Hedberg from the Swedish Weather and Climate Center taking a snap of the just installed weather sensor on the top of Journeyman’s targa arch. One of his projects includes using online measurements from the Journeyman to fine tune weather forecast models for open ocean environments.

I clearly remember the day I realized that my next yacht should have a workshop. We were hanging out in Ponta Delgada on São Miguel, preparing for the crossing over to Ireland. Next to us was a brand new Swan 65 that was just finishing it’s first season and heading back home to the UK. It had all sorts of problems that I thought would not occur in such an expansive and high profile yacht. The heaters didn’t work. The engine had troubles with the fuel system. Some instruments had hick-ups. And so on. That’s when I realized, things breaking is part of everyday life for all long distance sailors, and that yachts should cater to that instead of trying to pretend it isn’t.

By the way, we had to cancel the Ireland ambitions on that crossing, and ended up in A Coruña instead. Which was good, considering some people who failed to dodge the storm had some troubles… (That was not the same Swan, though).

Anyway, today we finished the workbench, except I need to decide how to organize the walls. But that’s for later. A side effect is that since the workbench is right next to the galley it can also be used for food preparation in case several people are cooking together.